Summary1. The distribution of additive vs. non-additive genetic variation in natural populations represents a central topic of research in evolutionary/organismal biology. For evolutionary physiologists, functional or whole-animal performance traits ('physiological traits') are frequently studied assuming they are heritable and variable in populations. 2. Physiological traits of evolutionary relevance are those functional capacities measured at the whole-organism level, with a potential impact on fitness. They can be classified as capacities (or performances) or costs, the former being directly correlated with fitness and the latter being inversely correlated with fitness (usually assumed as constraints). 3. In spite of their obvious adaptive significance, the additive genetic variation in physiological traits, and its relative contribution to phenotypic variance (or narrow-sense heritability) in comparison with maternal, dominance or epistatic variance, is known only for a few groups such as insects and mammals. 4. In this study, we assessed the additive and maternal/non-additive genetic variation in a suite of physiological and morphological traits in populations of the land snail Cornu aspersum. 5. Except for dehydration rate (h 2 = 0Á32 AE 0Á15), egg mass (h 2 = 0Á82 AE 0Á30) and hatchling mass (h 2 = 1Á01 AE 0Á31; population = fixed effect), we found very low additive genetic variation. Large non-additive/maternal effects were found in all traits. Cage effects did not change the results, indicating low contribution of common environmental variance to our results. No differences were found between the phenotypic and non-additive genetic variance/covariance matrices. 6. Even though we compared populations across 1300 km in a common garden set-up, our results suggest an absence of physiological as well as morphological differentiation in these populations. 7. These results contrast with previous analyses in the original distributional range of this species, which found high additive genetic variation in morphological traits. These are intriguing results demanding further quantitative genetic studies in the original distributional range of this species as well as the history of colonization of this invasive species.

Life-history evolution-the way organisms allocate time and energy to reproduction, survival, and growth-is a central question in evolutionary biology. One of its main tenets, the allocation principle, predicts that selection will reduce energy costs of maintenance in order to divert energy to survival and reproduction. The empirical support for this principle is the existence of a negative relationship between fitness and metabolic rate, which has been observed in some ectotherms. In juvenile animals, a key function affecting fitness is growth rate, since fast growers will reproduce sooner and maximize survival. In principle, design constraints dictate that growth rate cannot be reduced without affecting maintenance costs. Hence, it is predicted that juveniles will show a positive relationship between fitness (growth rate) and metabolic rate, contrarily to what has been observed in adults. Here we explored this problem using land snails (Cornu aspersum). We estimated the additive genetic variance-covariance matrix for growth and standard metabolic rate (SMR; rate of CO2 production) using 34 half-sibling families. We measured eggs, hatchlings, and juveniles in 208 offspring that were isolated right after egg laying (i.e., minimizing maternal and common environmental variance). Surprisingly, our results showed that additive genetic effects (narrow-sense heritabilities, h(2)) and additive genetic correlations (rG) were small and nonsignificant. However, the nonadditive proportion of phenotypic variances and correlations (rC) were unexpectedly large and significant. In fact, nonadditive genetic effects were positive for growth rate and SMR ([Formula: see text]; [Formula: see text]), supporting the idea that fitness (growth rate) cannot be maximized without incurring maintenance costs. Large nonadditive genetic variances could result as a consequence of selection eroding the additive genetic component, which suggests that past selection could have produced nonadditive genetic correlation. It is predicted that this correlation is reduced when adulthood is attained and selection starts to promote the reduction in metabolic rate.

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This preprint has been reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Evolutionary Biology (http://dx.doi.org/10.24072/pci.evolbiol.100048). For ectothermic species with broad geographical distributions, latitudinal/altitudinal variation in environmental temperatures (averages and extremes) are expected to shape the evolution of physiological tolerances and the acclimation capacity (i.e., degree of phenotypic plasticity) of natural populations. This can create geographical gradients of selection in which environments with greater thermal variability (e.g., seasonality) tend to favour individuals that maximize performance across a broader range of temperatures compared to more stable environments. Although thermal acclimation capacity plays a fundamental role in this context, it is unknown whether natural selection targets this trait in natural populations. Here we addressed such an important gap in our knowledge by measuring survival, through mark recapture integrated into an information-theoretic approach, as a function of the plasticity of critical thermal limits for activity, behavioural thermal preference and the thermal sensitivity of metabolism in the northernmost population of the four-eyed frogPleurodema thaul. Overall, our results indicate that thermal acclimation in this population is not being targeted by directional selection, although there might be signals of selection on individual traits. According to the most supported models, survival decreased in individuals with less tolerance to cold when cold-acclimated (probably because daily low extremes are frequent during the cooler periods of the year) and increased with body size. However, in both cases, the directional selection estimates were non-significant.